December 17, 2011

According to latest leaks 6950/6970(Cayman) gonna be the only cards with VLIW4 arch. And since Apple never used and most likely will never use vliw4 cards, we may end up with no Cayman support in osx drivers at all( with patches – on incomplete level). It can be 4890 story all over again.

Did u see how much secrecy (even more) over pci-e 3.0?
I wonder how closed will intel pci-e3 arch support will be to us.
I imagine if Linux did not exists… in the end it makes unix/NOTunix be the salvation of who wants info on how the chipset you bought works.
Until when will A. ping-pong us on nvidia and amd/ati?
You pass months researching and in the end, all your time was lost in another unsupported architecture.
Someone should launch an “IT-leaks” to solve this closure…
just thoughts…

It’s not being the best GPU that is the problem, it’s being the unique, low-volume GPU. It’s obviously much more favourable for Apple to support a whole family of GPUs with a common architecture/driver than to split development time over many different architectures. In this case though, it’s probably the delays in Sandy Bridge Xeons that killed it, since that pushed a possible Mac Pro refresh back into the HD7000 series timeframe.

I was checking out InsideMacGames and came across an article with Advanced Micro Devices’ Chris Bentley, the company’s Mac 3D Manager.

Quote: “Finally, as I mentioned above, the biggest change for 3D in Lion was OpenGL 3.2 support, which included 16 new extensions supported on all the drivers from the AMD HD Radeon 2400 on up to the AMD HD Radeon 6970.”